Sigmund Freud Quotes
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It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.
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A strong egoism is a protection.
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The idea of men's receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic - that is, a genetic - explanation of such a feeling.
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The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.
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When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves...
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The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
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Plaque was placed on 6 May 1977 at Bellevue (a house on the slopes of the Wienerwald) where the Freud family spent their summers.
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When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any the more clearly for doing so.
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Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?
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Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.
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Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality.
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Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
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We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.
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In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
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Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
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An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable requirements for my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy coincided in the same person.
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America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.
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Let us consider the polarity of love and hate.... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate.
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The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.
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Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.
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The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.
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We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast.
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To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living being Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.
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Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.